The State of Women's Representation 2013-2014

The State of Women's Representation 2013-2014 is a report by FairVote's Representation 2020 project. It is the first in a series of annual reports leading to the year 2020, the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment. It summarizes and analyzes women’s representation in elected office, and monitors progress for each of the six areas of our 2020 Pledge, such as new party rules to ensure that political parties recruit and nominate more women candidates; the adoption of fair voting plans (proportional voting) with multi-member districts to increase the likelihood of women running for and winning elected office; and gender-conscious legislative practices to ensure that the legislative process is not biased against women.

The report also establishes Representation 2020's unique Parity Index, which measures the level of women's representation in each state. By our measurement, no state has ever reached 50-50 parity in representation, though New Hampshire is very close, with 47.5 points out of a possible 100. Virginia ranks lowest, with a score of 4.5. As we will show, while some progress is being made in getting more women elected to public office, the progress is slow and could benefit from Representation 2020's key reforms.